liquid blackness is pleased to share the CFP for the next Rendering (the) Visible. As the cfp states, the graduate program in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University has, over the past several years, been exploring some of the implications of liquidity, specifically in relation to race, via our research group liquid blackness. Now, however, we wish to explore the ways in which the concept of liquidity might begin to chart new ways to understand the image’s relation to space, sensoriality, and digitality, as well as to develop an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the political ontology of motion, form, matter, and noise.

Abstracts are due October 20. Please share widely. The conference will be held February 8-10 2018 in the School of Film, Media & Theatre at Georgia State University.

Faculty coordinator of liquid blackness, Alessandra Raengo will participate in The Futures of Afrofuturism: A Symposium at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Futures will present new perspectives on Afrofuturism, a contemporary arts movement connecting the musical, literary, and visual arts and combining elements of science fiction and speculative futurism, history, and fantasy with African and African diasporic cultures and political standpoints. The symposium will be held March 30-31, 2017 in the Haslam Business Building, West Wing, Rm. 440. For a full schedule and list of participants click here.

ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) is accepting submissions through March 15th for the 9th annual meeting to be held October 26-28, 2017 at the Oakland Marriott Convention Center and hosted by U.C. Berkley. Submission guidelines and more details are available here.

On Black Futures looks for those other modes of being in the world – geographically, aesthetically, temporally, speculatively – that expand how we understand blackness in relation to futurity and the fantastic as fundamental to black thought and black being.

On Black Futures is a two day symposium held on February 3-4, 2017 and hosted by The Graduate Certificate Students in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. A full description of the symposium and presenters is available here.

liquid blackness is pleased to announce that the 2015 publication, L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinemaedited by Allison Field and Jan-Christopher Horak and published by University of California Press will be awarded best edited collection at the 2017 SCMS annual conference. The awards ceremony will be held Friday, March 24th at the Fairmont Chicago. Faculty coordinator of liquid blackness, Alessandra Raengo’s essay, “Encountering the Rebellion: liquid blackness Reflects on the Expansive Possibilities of the L.A. Rebellion Films,” is included in the collection and describes the research which culminated in “The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble” project.

Papers to be presented by liquid blackness faculty advisor, Alessandra Raengo and editorial staff member, Jenny Gunn were recently included in a CAA News article highlighting the emphasis on intersections of race and art at the 2017 annual College Art Association Conference in New York City. The papers of other friends of liquid blackness including Lauren Cramer, Derek Conrad Murray, Deborah Willis and Sarah Cervenak were also highlighted.

Faculty coordinator of liquid blackness, Alessandra Raengo will present a paper entitled, “Black Liquidity and the Weaving of Black Sociality,” at the SLSA 2016 Annual Meeting. Dr. Raengo will present on the “Network Ephemerality” panel on Friday, November 4, from 1:30 PM-3:30 PM (Panel G Ansley 7) in the Westin Peachtree hotel in downtown Atlanta. Read below the paper abstract in full:

While the resilience of the “racial panopticon” and anti-black violence has moved several “Afropessimist” scholars to understand blackness under the rubric of “social death,” the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement vindicates instead the opposing “Afro-optimist” position, which affirms the generative capacity of black social life. “Black Liquidity and the Weaving of Black Sociality” examines this tension in Arthur Jafa’s essay film Dreams are Colder than Death (2013), a meditation on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech,” conducted through interviews with African-American intellectuals and artists. Woven together with lyrical, slow-motion images of ordinary black people, water and cosmological images of deep space, these voices reflect on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the concept of the human. Eventually, through the words of Fred Moten, the film questions the possibility to love black people once blackness is solely understood within the “afterlife of slavery.” This paper reads the film’s rhizomatic structure, which effectively performs the very networks of solidarity, grief, and grievance sought by #BLM, as the evidence of such love. Through its aesthetic liquidity, i.e. the film’s facility to move across scale –from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective—and the way it disjoins some of the very conditions for black surveillance—voices strategically recorded independently from the image; faces hardly visible because shot against intense light sources—the film claims for blackness the expansiveness that institutes radical networks of black love.